Related papers: What is ab initio?
Nuclear theory today aims for a comprehensive theoretical framework that can describe all nuclei. I discuss recent progress in this pursuit and the associated challenges as we move forward.
High-precision predictions of nuclear properties are a central objective of ab initio nuclear structure theory. However, state-of-the-art many-body methods rely on truncated model spaces to render the nuclear many-body problem tractable,…
A major goal of nuclear theory is to explain the spectra and stability of nuclei in terms of effective many-body interactions amongst the nucleus' constituents-the nucleons, i.e., protons and neutrons. Such an approach, referred to below as…
A brief review of recent progress in the ab intio theory of nuclear pairing is given. Nowdays several successful solutions of the ab intio BCS theory gap equation were published which show that it is a promising first step in the problem.…
Nuclear forces and the nuclear many-body problem have been some of Gerry Brown's main topics in his so productive life as a theoretical physicist. In this talk, I outline how Gerry's work laid the foundations of the modern theory of nuclear…
The description of nuclei starting from the constituent nucleons and the realistic interactions among them has been a long-standing goal in nuclear physics. In addition to the complex nature of the nuclear forces, with two-, three- and…
An {\em ab initio} (i.e., from first principles) theoretical framework capable of providing a unified description of the structure and low-energy reaction properties of light nuclei is desirable to further our understanding of the…
Structural phenomena in nuclei, from shell structure and clustering to superfluidity and collective rotations and vibrations, reflect emergent degrees of freedom. Ab initio theory describes nuclei directly from a fully microscopic…
A brief review of recent microscopic calculations of nuclear pairing gap is given. A semi-microscopic model is suggested in which the ab-initio effective pairing interaction is supplemented with a small phenomenological addendum. It…
Quantum mechanics has enjoyed a multitude of successes since its formulation in the early twentieth century. At the same time, it has generated puzzles that persist to this day. These puzzles have inspired a large literature in physics and…
Nuclei are prototypes of many-body open quantum systems. Complex aggregates of protons and neutrons that interact through forces arising from quantum chromo-dynamics, nuclei exhibit both bound and unbound states, which can be strongly…
The computational cost of ab initio nuclear structure calculations is rendered particularly acute by the presence of (at least) three-nucleon interactions. This feature becomes especially critical now that many-body methods aim at extending…
Exact symmetry and symmetry-breaking phenomena play a key role in providing a better understanding of the physics of many-particle systems, from quarks and atomic nuclei, to molecules and galaxies. In atomic nuclei, exact and dominant…
The fission process is a fascinating phenomenon in which the atomic nucleus, a compact self-bound mesoscopic system, undergoes a spontaneous or induced quantum transition into two or more fragments. A predictive, accurate and precise…
We show that the {\it ab initio} calculations of nuclear thermodynamics can be performed efficiently using lattice effective field theory. The simulations use a new approach called the pinhole trace algorithm to calculate thermodynamic…
Understanding nuclear structure, reactions, and the properties of neutron stars from \textit{ab initio} calculations from the nucleon degrees of freedom has always been a primary goal of nuclear physics, in which the microscopic nuclear…
How does nuclear binding emerge from first principles? Our current best understanding of nuclear forces is based on a systematic low-energy expansion called chiral effective field theory. However, recent {\it ab initio} calculations of…
We present a method for calculating ab initio interatomic forces which scales quadratically with the size of the system and provides a physically transparent representation of the force in terms of the spatial variation of the electronic…
A relativistic approach to describe nuclear and in general strongly interacting matter is introduced and discussed. Here, not only the nuclear forces but also the masses of the nucleons are generated through meson fields. Within this…
These notes are an outgrowth of an advanced undergraduate course taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. They are intended as an introduction to various aspects of particle and nuclear physics with an emphasis on the role of…